University of Wisconsin - Extension

Following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the news media have provided much useful advice on helping children cope with fears they may have.

Most of the advice has told us how to respond once children show abnormal levels of fear or stress. This advice derives largely from clinical psychology, which focuses on treatment. In contrast, we might ask how to prevent that fear or stress in the first place. Such advice comes from developmental and social psychology, which study how people learn, grow, and feel in the normal world.

Emotional Responses are Learned, not Automatic

Here is the most useful thing psychology can tell us: Children do not have an automatic fear response to these news reports. They look primarily to the adults around them for cues on which emotional response to adopt. If their parents and teachers are calm, then children will respond with calm also. So we should counsel parents and teachers to carefully monitor their own reactions to the news reports. This simple act will prevent most of the problems about which the clinical psychologists are worried.

Background: Social Cues for Emotional Response

Many research studies confirm that social cues are key to many of our emotional responses. This is different from most peoples¿ viewpoint that emotional responses are automatic responses to events. Not so.

For example, studies of preschool-aged children who have had forced sexual contact with an adult (without being physically injured) show that, if their parents maintain a calm facade in the face of this devastating news, then the children often exhibit little or no psychological trauma. The part of this experience that makes young children become emotionally distraught, sleepless, regress in their behavior patterns is when their parents fall apart at first news of the sexual abuse. The children learn from their parents how to respond emotionally to their situation.

Stanley Schachter¿s Famous Study

A well-known psychology experiment first demonstrated this principle fifty years ago. Dr. Stanley Schachter told subjects in his experiment that he was testing the effect of a powerful vitamin on memory. But, in reality, the pill he gave them was an amphetamine aroused their nervous systems so they were wide awake and full of energy. (Since his subjects were not fully informed, this study would be stopped as unethical today.) Half the subjects waited in a room with people who talked about how worried they were about the experiment. The other half waiting with people who talked about how exciting it was to be part of the research.

When Schachter tested the emotional response of his experimental subjects he found that the drug caused the first group to become very fearful and tense (they even had sweaty palms!), while the second group (who received the same drug) had become extremely happy. In other words, they experienced the same physiological response to the drug, but interpreted it in opposite ways, depending upon the social cues they received.

The subjects of Schachter¿s study were adults. We are all like this. But children are especially prone to emotional cues from the social setting, because they have less experience in life and therefore fewer habitual patterns of emotional response.

Reactions to ¿Desert Storm¿

Think back to the ¿Desert Storm¿ war in Kuwait and Iraq. Many young children experienced unhealthy levels of fear during this period. For those children who had parents or other loved ones in the conflict, these fears were understandable. But for most children, their fears were irrational and unhealthy. The most startling thing about their fears was that the television reports showed nothing that was scary. Certainly no people being injured or killed were shown in the reports, unlike most of programs children watch on television. So what frightened the children? They were frightened by the tension and uncertainty they observed in their parents and teachers. When we ignore the everyday violence of their television shows, they easily learn to consider it normal and expect-able (which is a separate problem). In contrast, when we turn the volume up and obsessively watch the news reports with worried brows, then children get worried too.

Emotional Reactions Are Learned Habits

Think for a moment of the pro tennis players you see on TV. When one of them misses a shot, he whines at the umpire. In the same situation, another player mutters angrily to himself. A third remains calm and intense when he misses a shot. Each of them believes their emotional response is a natural (unlearned) reaction to this frustration. They are wrong. In fact, each has developed a habitual pattern of emotional response to this situation, so that their reaction is certainly automatic, but not inevitable or ¿natural.¿ It is a learned habit, which they could un-learn or change if they desired.

Seen in this light, every frustrating or scary event in a child¿s life is an opportunity to teach them the most useful emotional response, so that this response might become part of their habitual pattern of response. There is a whole field of developmental psychology on this topic today, which is called ¿emotional self-regulation.¿ Some tennis players learn an immature response to frustration, while others learn a mature, self-responsible response. Similarly, we can teach our children to fall apart emotionally at signs of danger, or we can teach them calmness in the face of unsettling times.

Dave Riley is the Rothermel-Bascom Professor of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Child Development Specialist for UW-Extension. He is co-director of Wisconsin's Early Childhood Excellence Initiative.